


Familiar Places

by ninaswritings



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, One Shot, cheesy percy, he just loves her a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 01:59:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18790729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninaswritings/pseuds/ninaswritings
Summary: Being in Camp Jupiter with no memory, Percy has a lot of time on his hands to go on quests that take him through San Fransisco. One winter day, Percy passes a house that looks familiar, but he can't place it. He keeps coming back to it over and over, sometimes seeing a family, sometimes seeing nothing. One day, he rings the doorbell and a girl with shiny blonde curls answers. The weird part? He recognizes her.





	Familiar Places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annabetncnase](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annabetncnase/gifts).



> A collaborative piece with the lovely biaswift (annabetncnase on tumblr), based off on a headcanon by lordgrover on Tumblr. Biaswift wrote this same idea but with a slightly different take/outcome so you should definitely check out hers too!

    At Camp Jupiter, much like at Camp Halfblood, life was never boring. Unpleasant? Maybe. Dangerous? Definitely. But boring? Absolutely not. Percy was constantly on the move. He still didn’t have most of his memories, but he knew that he needed to get back to Camp Halfblood, partially because he missed it and partially because of the prophecy, but most importantly he needed to get back to Annabeth. He was always going on quests, off to defeat whatever monster that needed to be defeated, or doing whatever needed to be done to get to Long Island (those things were not always exclusive from each other).

    It was a cold winter day when he saw the house for the first time. On first sight, the house was nothing remarkable. It was a simple 3-story house, next to a row of identical other 3-story house on either side. However, the minute Percy passed that particular house he felt as if he had seen that exact one before. There was something that struck him as familiar about the yard, the car, even the interior that he could see through the big, wide window in front. A memory started tugging at the back of his mind, but it was still too far away to recall. Percy had been there before, he was certain of it. He just didn’t know when or why. It was frustrating, to say the least. That day, Percy left without doing anything.

    After he left, Percy couldn’t quite get the house out of his mind. It was like it wanted him to remember. Somehow he felt that if he remembered when he had seen that house before and why it was so familiar, he might be able to get his full memory back. He was just missing a link to truly connect everything together.  
Some of it had come trickling back over the past couple of weeks. He remembered his mom, and Chiron – his old mentor at camp. Annabeth, of course (though he still didn’t know what she even looked like, which hurt more than he was willing to admit). He was able to recall some events he had lived through like the Second Titan War, where they had prevented Kronos from taking over the world. He also remembered some snippets, like a casino-hotel in Las Vegas, or blowing up a volcano (and almost dying). Most if it he had still trouble recalling, though.

    A week later, Percy found himself back at the house for the second time. All he could do then was stare at it. He noticed movement behind the curtains, but couldn’t get himself to step up to the front door. It took him revisiting over and over many times before Percy even worked up the courage to ring the doorbell, and even after he did that for the first time, future visits would still just have him, standing on the other side of the street, longing to find out more but also afraid of what he would find. Sometimes he’d see a glimpse of the life that was happening inside. A tuff of blonde hair, or a woman telling off her children. It pained him to see that, a normal life that he could never have. Maybe, he figured, that’s what stopped him to ring the doorbell so many times.

    The first time Percy actually rang the doorbell, he was met by silence. When he had walked up to the house, he had found the windows dark, no movement or signs of life behind them. Still, he had to try, rip of the Band-Aid so to say, so he finally forced himself up to the front door. Ten minutes, and no one answered. Percy had expected that, though he was still let-down. The time he came after that, he saw figures moving in the rooms upstairs and his courage failed him. This happened on more than one occasion. He did try to see if they were home sometimes, but every time he actually saw them he fled.

    One day, he found the house empty yet again. He was ready to turn around and leave when he heard the roar of a car engine coming up behind him. With quick thinking, Percy hid himself in the bushes of the house behind him to find the car pulling up in the driveway of the house he’d visited a dozen times by now. First, a man stepped out. He was middle-aged, a full head of grey hair with still a bit of blond in it. When Percy saw him, he felt that same jolt as when he saw the house for the first time. He didn’t know when he had seen this man before, but he knew that he knew him. He was planning on walking up to him until the rest of the passengers stepped out. It was the woman and the two children he had been seeing before. The boys were teenagers, about ready to hit puberty. The woman was slightly younger than the man, but clearly she was the mother of the two children. Percy felt as if this picture was both incomplete and complete at the same time. Naturally, he had no idea why. Before he even attempted to approach them, the family disappeared inside the house.

    The weeks following that day, Percy didn’t get to go to the house. Quests kept piling up, there were monsters that needed to be defeated, and Camp Jupiter was close to finding a way to get to Camp Halfblood, so Percy needed to prepare for that as well. He did notice that there were less monsters he had to hunt down than before. Maybe there was some other vigilante demigod that got to them before he was able to. Percy snickered at the thought. 

    It had snowed, when he found himself back on the doorsteps. Snow was rare, it being San Francisco, but the weather had been crazy lately. Might as well be snow in Frisco. It wasn’t much; just a thin sheet of white specks, barely covering the cobbles below. But it was snow. Percy took a deep breath, and rang the bell for what felt like the millionth time. And like the millionth time, he was met by silence. Percy was about to turn around and head back to Camp Jupiter when he heard actual footsteps coming down a staircase. In front of him, the door opened and Percy found himself looking into the two most beautiful stormy grey eyes he had ever seen. They were glistening in the winter sun, but there was also a deep sadness behind them that couldn’t quite be conveyed by the friendly smile the girl had on when she opened the door. Percy noticed that her sun-tanned face was framed by a head full of blonde curls. She looked like a hotter version of Cinderella.  
    The girl’s smile fell immediately when she looked up at his face; she was surprised, and Percy had to admit that he was too. He recognized her. Not the “I’ve seen you before but I don’t know where”-type of recognition that he had been dealing with a lot lately, but he knew exactly who she was, where she was born and where she had grown up, even what her favorite food was. She was the name that had floated around in his mind for months now, the name he murmured in a soft whisper every night before he went to sleep and dream about home, she was the first thought in his mind in the morning, a silent promise he had made to himself because he needed to get back to her. All that time he had spent at Camp Jupiter had been to find her. Annabeth. And now she was here, in front of him. She was more beautiful than in his wildest dreams. Though the only memory Percy had woken up with was her name, before that moment he had never been able to remember her face.  
    “Hi,” he said. Every part of him that could shake was trembling. He wanted to pinch himself to see if he was dreaming or not.  
    “Percy?” her voice was no more than a whisper, but it sounded like a melody to him. “Is … is it you? Like, actually you?”  
    “Yes.”  
    “Do you know .. do you recognize me?”  
    Percy nodded. “You’re Annabeth Chase. You’re my girlfriend, and you’re my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were 12 years old and since then have spent every summer together. And I love you.”  
    “But how? I thought Hera had stolen your memories?” she seemed a bit skeptical, and given their line of work Percy thought it was more than fair. But he also recognized a tiny bit of hope in her voice.  
    “She did. Or well, tried to,” he explained. “And she took almost everything, but there was one thing she could never erase. You. I woke up, and I barely knew who I was, but I remembered your name. You’re stuck in my mind, Wise Girl.”


End file.
